Work Text:
“all my stories are about being left,
all yours about leaving. so we should have known.”
—“waiting for this story to end before i begin another,” jan heller levi
⚔
Two days after Lucy Carlyle leaves his company but not his every waking thought—and probably some of the dreaming ones besides—the ad for her freelance services appears in the papers. Lockwood catches sight of it as he skims the Times over breakfast that morning and all the breath goes out of him before he’s even registered what it is he’s looking at, or why exactly it lands like a blow.
It’s nothing fancy—just enough to get the necessary information across in the space available. Name, number, specialties: the works. Like Lucy, it’s short and to the point, and also like Lucy, the sight of it is like twisting a knife Lockwood’s not ready to admit is in him. The hot, sharp feeling is there, though, whether he'll admit it or not, and has been since she last stood before all of them, knuckles taut and white as they gripped the back of her chair.
(No one’s sat in the chair since, and the three of them just let it sit there, empty and half-dragged out from under the table until George stubs his toe on it two weeks later and swears loud enough to wake any Visitors within a kilometer, and all the neighbors besides. He kicks it into a corner in retribution, and there it stays for yet another week until Holly finally slips it back into its proper place. None of that changes the fact that it’s still empty, and so is the attic, and so is Lockwood’s chest when he thinks too long about either.)
Lockwood’s fingers tighten around the edges of the pages, creasing the paper and giving himself a papercut in the process, but he ignores the stinging in his finger in favor of rereading the ad again, and then a third time. It’s not like he expected her to come back after just a day or two—Lucy’s much too stubborn for that, he knows—but it’s still something like a shock to see hard evidence that she’s really left Lockwood & Co, and that she means to stay gone. He won’t let himself think it could be for good, but the fact that there was any kind of leaving involved is bad enough.
You’d think Anthony Lockwood would be used to people leaving by now.
He’s not.
At least, Lockwood decides, he knows she’s alive.
Which isn’t to say that he expects Lucy to go and get herself killed (far from it), but sometimes he wonders. And most of the time, he worries.
His eyes fall again on the phone number, and some wild part of him almost considers calling it right then and there. Not to speak, no—just to hear Lucy’s voice on the other end when she picks up the phone. It would be an exercise in futility, and it’s a useless thought as-is, so obviously he doesn’t do it. But maybe he’ll think that useless thought for just a little longer.
It’s George who snaps him out of it, shuffling into the kitchen and heading straight for the toaster like a man on a very important mission. Knowing George, toast probably does rank pretty high on the agenda at this time of day.
“Anything interesting today?” he asks when he notices Lockwood seated at the table with the paper. Unwillingly, Lockwood tears his eyes away from the Agencies page to glance up at George, who seems generally half awake. Swiftly, but not too swiftly, he folds the pages back up.
“Nothing,” he says, voice light; a study in nonchalance. “Nothing at all.”
Rising, Lockwood chucks the paper in the bin and heads down the basement stairs to practice his footwork with Floating Joe. If he waits until George has mercifully vacated the kitchen to dash back up the stairs and fish the damn thing back out of the trash, keeping it tucked in his middle desk drawer thereafter, well, that’s his prerogative. After all, who knows? They might need to hire a Listener someday. No one can fault him for being prepared.
⚔
Lucy went quietly, which still feels wrong. She’s never been the quiet sort—ironic, considering her Talent, but Lockwood’s always thought it suits her all the same.
It goes like this: a thump on the stairs is what first wakes Lockwood. He blinks awake, unsure what time it is, and simply lies on his back for a moment, absorbing the fact that it’s not late morning and yet he is, somehow, awake. Outside, the sky is a grey-streaked navy, and the ghost-lamps are just beginning to shut off against the oncoming dawn. As with all winter mornings, the night is reluctant to relinquish the sky to the day, so the sun remains an idea the horizon has not yet had.
Lockwood’s always been a light sleeper, leastways since—well, since he was nine, anyway. That’s the long and short of it. The longer is that it’s gotten worse these last few days since Aickmere’s, if he’s honest, which happens less often than you might think, depending on your definition of honest and your personal tolerance for half-truths and lies of omission. For some reason he isn’t willing to acknowledge, he can’t get that awful scream of Lucy’s out of his head, nor that tangle of shadows she seemed to speak to so tenderly. (Normal people would be having nightmares about the poltergeist, or the room of skeletons, or maybe Kipps’ face when he heard Rotwell got to the room before Fittes. Not Lockwood, apparently.)
All this to say he’s tired, moreso than he has been in a while. After his argument with Lucy yesterday, back and forth over the sidewalk and then the café table—where he tried begging, cajoling, reasoning, even snapping there at the end (which he’s not particularly proud of), all of it to no avail—he found himself back where he always ends up, one way or another: the Marylebone cemetery. Head full to bursting, he climbed the wall, traversed crackling dead foliage, and sat on the stone across from his family’s plot. And sat. And sat. And sat some more, turning it all round in his head: Aickmere’s, Lucy, and the things she wasn’t saying.
He examined it from every angle, trying to figure out what was driving Lucy further away from them—from him?—than ever, and how he might fix it. Why, he wondered, was she so suddenly determined to go? What use was going? When had leaving ever fixed a damn thing? And why was it that she kept looking at him with something almost like guilt ever since Aickmere’s, if she’d already confessed to riffling through Jessica’s things and been all but forgiven for it?
There were too many questions and not enough answers, and in the end, he stayed out far later than he ought, almost until curfew (earlier than ever, with the Problem tightening its grip each frost-bitten day), hacking frustratedly at the dead and dying undergrowth with his rapier when he still couldn’t puzzle it all together into anything that made sense.
When he got back to Portland Row, it was near-dark and Holly was just heading out, giving him a worried look as she climbed into the Night Cab waiting at the curb. He remembers Lucy and George were arguing about the ghost-jar somewhere in the kitchen when he got in, George’s voice more frigidly polite than he’d ever heard it. Any other day, them arguing would be normal. Expected, even. Not so that night, or maybe ever again.
Things went on like that for the rest of the evening, and Lockwood finds he barely remembers any of it, so caught up was he in constructing his perfect argument to deliver to Lucy the next morning—his pièce de resistance. The thing that would get her to see reason. To stay. (He decided he’d apologize, too—for yelling. For storming off and leaving her there in the café. It wasn’t his greatest moment, to be sure.) He never gets the chance.
Anyway. The thump.
He thinks he must’ve dreamed it at first. After all, he’s had plenty of dreams where he’d swear it was his mother’s footsteps on the stairs that woke him, or the sound of Jessica calling his name. It never is, and it never will be, he knows that for certain now, but there was a while when he didn’t (a while when he hoped), so there’s still a part of him that wakes easily and takes a moment or two to remember he’s no longer dreaming.
It's the second thump and the muffled curse that follows that solidify the fact that he is very much awake. More specifically, Lucy’s muffled curse; George would forget to bother with being quiet. George also wouldn’t be up before dawn if he could help it. But neither would Lucy, which begs the question—what is she doing awake?
He knows the answer even before he hears the quiet footsteps resume, before his sleep-addled brain puts the pieces together. Two plus two is four, and Lockwood knows Lucy even on three hours of sleep; these are the great indisputable laws of the universe. For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.
Action: Lucy says she’s leaving.
Reaction: Lockwood asks her to stay. And the reaction to his own, it seems, is Lucy fleeing Portland Row before the ghost-lamps are even off.
(Or maybe, just maybe, Lucy leaving is a reaction of her own—but Lockwood can’t for the life of him figure out what she’s reacting to.)
Lockwood wants to deny it. He wants to believe that’s not what’s happening here, but again: he knows Lucy, and he should have seen this coming. He should have been up and waiting for her in the kitchen, or at the base of the stairs; should have put himself between her and the doors so she didn’t get the luxury of sneaking out and avoiding having to say goodbye or look him in the eye as she does.
Her footsteps pause for just a moment on the landing outside his door. He lies there and listens to the silence, listens to Lucy not leaving, not yet, and he thinks—what? That she’ll take two more steps across the landing and knock? That she’ll come in if he opens the door, or even if he doesn’t? That she’ll say goodbye, or change her mind if he asks her not to?
Quite frankly, Lockwood’s not sure what he thinks, but he’d have been wrong on all accounts.
It goes like this: Lucy leaves.
The worst part is that he lets her.
It takes him a full two minutes to realize that she’s left as in left the house not just left the landing, left the attic, left the stairs. By the time he hears the front door close, he’s only got time to propel himself out of bed to the window, to see her loading her battered duffle and suitcase into a Night Cab with little ceremony. And then it’s too late to do anything but watch.
(Later, Lockwood will wonder if it was too late even before then. As with many things in life, he never gets a satisfactory answer to that question.)
The whole thing takes less than five minutes, from thump to landing to door, but somehow Lockwood feels like he’s spent a lifetime at the window, willing Lucy to look up and see him standing there, watching her go.
She doesn’t.
In fact, Lucy doesn’t look back at all.
Lockwood really doesn’t know how to feel about that.
⚔
(When Holly comes in that morning, Lockwood’s already in the kitchen, sitting silently at the table in the stubbornly grey morning light, tapping one finger against the Thinking Cloth and staring into space instead of at the gossip magazine he’s got spread out on the table in front of him. If she’s surprised to see him, she doesn’t let on. Holly’s not the sort to be visibly ruffled—not at all like Lucy, who flushes and blusters and scowls with abandon.
“Don’t bother,” he says crisply when she’s got three mugs out of the cabinet and is going for a fourth. “Lucy’s gone.”
Holly blinks. Lockwood doesn’t.
“What do you mean?” she asks with something like dread in her voice when a few moments of awkward silence make it clear he doesn’t intend to elaborate. Behind her, George shambles into the kitchen, looking more awake than he normally does at this hour. The bar for George, of course, being not at all. Lockwood’s beginning to wonder if any of them got a decent night’s sleep last night; he has to admit it’s looking dire.
“I mean,” says Lockwood, reaching down and flicking to the next page of his neglected magazine, trying to maintain a steady composure and only somewhat succeeding, “she’s left. Properly. Packed in and took a cab this morning. I saw.”
He’s aware his sentences are too short. He’s aware they’re both staring at him. He’s also aware that he can’t manage to talk about it in any manner other than short, detached, as emotionless as possible.
“Already?” Holly squeaks. He’ll have to talk to her later, reassure her it wasn’t her fault. At least, Lockwood thinks it wasn’t, if Lucy’s claims were in any way true. At her shoulder, George is giving Lockwood a look that roughly translates to you saw and you didn’t stop her, you absolute bloody idiot? He opens his mouth, and Lockwood expects him to say as much, but instead, he gets:
“It’s worse than that,” George proclaims sullenly, abruptly turning and yanking open a cabinet to poke around for any leftover donuts that might be lying about. “She’s taken that bloody skull with her.”)
⚔
Somehow, the world spins on, the Problem persists, and Lockwood & Co. carries on much as they always have, sans one of their best (and only) operatives. It feels like it shouldn’t, like the sun should set in the east or traffic move backwards or rivers stop running to mirror the way their world has been so thoroughly upended, but if Anthony Lockwood knows one thing about life it’s that it’ll bloody well keep on, no matter what happens or who you lose. So they keep going too, even when everything feels off-kilter and wrong, because what else can they do?
The first job after Lucy’s abrupt departure, Lockwood calls Holly Luce twice without thinking and bites his tongue hard enough to bleed. Holly’s unfailingly polite about it, because Holly’s unfailingly polite about everything, but he can’t miss the way she flinches, or the way George refuses to look at either of them. He can taste his embarrassment on the backs of his teeth, bitter and coppery where it mingles with the blood from his tongue.
It's just an adjustment period, he tells himself, and to be fair, they do a good enough job of handling the Cold Maiden they’ve been paid to deal with. Sure, there’s an empty space at his right shoulder all night where he keeps looking for Lucy entirely on instinct, one he hasn’t the first idea how to go about correcting, or even if he wants to—but it’s the first night. The first job. It’s to be expected. He thinks: It’ll get better.
But really, it just gets worse.
For one thing, he keeps finding bits and pieces of Lucy’s things lying about Portland Row for weeks afterwards. Either she didn’t care, or she didn’t realize that she hadn’t gotten everything in her haste to leave that morning, because Lockwood’s found everything from leggings balled behind the washer to sweaters discarded in the library.
Here is an incomplete list of things Lucy Carlyle left behind at 35 Portland Row: three pairs of leggings; five socks (none matching); the scarf George bought her last Christmas to replace the one she lost to a Changer in Soho; several pairs of underwear (clean); a pack of disposable razors; two half-full sketchbooks; a fraying sports bra; a single glove with an ectoplasm burn on the back of the hand; her favorite star-spangled blue mug in the rack by the sink; and one very agitated Anthony Lockwood, Esquire.
They’re forever discovering something new down the back of the sofa or hanging in a forgotten corner of the basement, and the worst part is Lockwood doesn’t know what to do with any of it. Holly suggests giving it back to her, but if he’s honest, he doesn’t want to talk to Lucy, not yet. Not until he’s figured out just what to say to get her back. Because he is going to get her back. They’ll keep it on hand, he tells himself. Just in case.
One change he does allow, however, is a new Thinking Cloth. It’s true that Holly’s been wanting to replace it for ages, and it’s true that they were running out of space what with all of George’s diagrams and notes starting to get more out of hand than usual, but it would be a lie to say that was the only reason Lockwood agreed. The main one is that exactly ten and a half centimeters from his seat at the table was a months-old note from Lucy in purple ink: Gone out. Won’t be long. No cases without me. Back soon!
She has been long, and she won’t be back soon, and Lockwood’s damn tired of reading it and wishing it weren’t from September.
They still keep the old one, however, covered as it is in all Lucy’s doodles and notes and mindless scribbles, folded up and stored in the basement. In case George wants his diagrams someday for his memoir, once he’s solved the Problem, Lockwood says.
It’s not a lie, but it’s not the truth, either.
⚔
Holly starts spending nights over after some of the rougher cases—and there’s a lot of rougher cases; though the Chelsea Outbreak has largely diminished, the Problem only worsens that winter—the ones that keep them up past dawn, or sometimes when the weather’s particularly bad. The first time it happens, a miserable freezing rain is falling and the Night Cabs stop running for fear of sliding on the darkened, slippery streets. They’re lucky to get one back to Portland Row as it is.
“You can stay the night if you like, Hol,” Lockwood offers. The nickname’s still a bit awkward in his mouth, but he’s doing his best to make sure Holly feels as though she properly belongs here.
“Yes, I don’t like the look of those roads,” George adds, poking his head out of the kitchen from where he’s been making a post-case pot of tea. “Go out now and we’d probably have to go clean up your Visitor tomorrow night, and you know how nasty car crash victims tend to be, all twisted up and grisly.”
He shudders, and Holly does, too. Lockwood only rolls his eyes.
“I wouldn’t want to impose,” Holly says tentatively.
“Nonsense,” Lockwood dismisses. “You’re a part of this company, aren’t you? We take care of our own. Now, you can have my room; I just changed the sheets this morning, remember, because you wanted to do the laundry?”
Holly starts to nod, but then catches herself, brows furrowing prettily. “What about you, Lockwood? Where are you supposed to sleep?”
“Oh, don’t worry about that,” Lockwood says lightly, but firmly enough that Holly and George only exchange a look he pretends he doesn’t see.
Later, when they’ve both gone to bed and he’s finished pretending to oil the chains he finished twenty minutes ago, he climbs the stairs to the attic and spends the night under the eaves like he’s a child again.
(He leaves the door open when he comes down in the morning. Lockwood refuses to have another Jessica. He can’t and won’t close and lock the door on Lucy like he did with his family, though sometimes he thinks it might be simpler if he did. She’s not dead, he tells himself, just gone. Temporarily gone. There’s a difference.
He’s still figuring out how to persuade her to come back, but he will figure it out, if it’s the last thing he does.)
⚔
About two weeks after Lucy’s ad appears in the Times, Quill Kipps stops Lockwood in Mullet’s and hands him a small, laminated card. Lucy’s card, Lockwood realizes, after his brain kicks in and manages to read past her name in simple bold typeface at the top. Kipps doesn’t say a word, just gives it to Lockwood with hardly a second thought, which is good, because otherwise Lockwood might have been inclined to say thank you, which he’s not sure he could have managed.
(He keeps it in his breast pocket, ever after he fingers the address nearly to oblivion. It doesn’t matter because he’s memorized it well before that point, but he doesn’t throw it away even still.)
“I’ll keep an eye on her,” is all Kipps tells him before he leaves the store and Lockwood behind.
Lockwood’s almost annoyed by how grateful he feels.
⚔
They’re stretched thin that winter, thinner than before, even with Holly there to manage things in the office with the precision and diligence of a drill sergeant, even with her starting to go out on jobs with them more and more. It’s as good an excuse as any for Lockwood to take on more cases by himself.
He discovers early on that it’s easier to go out by himself, sometimes after his cases with Holly and George, sometimes on nights off, picking up a few extra jobs every few weeks, then every week, then most nights. It’s good for the company and good for his peace of mind—they earn extra money, which they can always use, and he wears himself out enough to calm his thoughts and manage to get some sleep at night. If he doesn’t, he usually ends up unable to get more than a few hours’ rest before the restlessness sets in and sends him searching for things to do.
Holly doesn’t like it, of course, and George outright hates it, but seeing as he’s their employer and the company’s in his name, there’s not a lot they can do about it, unless, he tells them icily one night when they corner him coming back from a couple of Lurker cases in Whitechapel, they want to quit Lockwood & Co. as well.
(Stop taking Lucy leaving out on us, George snaps at him when he says this.
I am not— he begins, but George’s derisive snort cuts him off.
Yes, you are, he says. You may think you’re the only person upset about it, Lockwood, but you’re not, so stop acting like it and grow up.)
Of course, if they quit, it wouldn’t do anything towards stopping Lockwood going out on his own anyway, but it felt good to say it. To be angry for just a moment, instead of pretending he doesn’t feel anything at all.
Hiring someone new only comes up once, and only half-heartedly at that. George snorts and Holly looks away and Lockwood himself isn’t even keen on the idea, just brought it up to get them off his back. They’re just as bad as he is, but at least now they’ve got the decency to look ashamed about it.
Lockwood keeps going out on his own, and the company stays at just three people (now without even a talking skull to lend words of questionable wisdom on the side) and nobody likes it, but it’s better than the alternative. It’s good enough that they’ll make it work.
And work it does, or at least something must be, because that very month Lockwood & Co. finds itself the recipient of the Agency of the Month award, which surprises no one who’s bothered to pay attention to their exploits since Chelsea—which is to say, it catches Lockwood entirely off guard, not that he’d ever admit it. He knows he should be proud, and he is proud, standing there and accepting it with Holly at his side and George standing contentedly out of frame. He’s got everything he ever wanted, but somehow he still wishes it were under different circumstances. He wishes it wasn’t just Holly at his side.
He still hasn’t seen Lucy, still hasn’t found the right way to ask her back yet. There is a right way, he’s sure of it, but it’s proving quite irritating to find.
Sometimes when he sees Barnes, the inspector gives him a look more pointed than the end of Lockwood’s rapier and asks if he’s hired anyone new on, and the answer’s always no.
“Ms. Carlyle’s still freelance, I see,” he says as Lockwood strides past him after the award ceremony that day. “Shame. Mad as you all are, you worked well together.”
Lockwood doesn’t grace that particular assessment with a reply.
⚔
(There’s a pile of papers accumulating on the corner of Lockwood’s desk these days. At first glance, they’re nothing special, but the truth is it’s a stack of every paper with a mention of Lucy and her cases since she left. He follows her freelance career as devoutly as some people do religion, keeping an eye out, making sure she’s okay as best he can from the distance she so intentionally placed between them. It never feels like enough, but it’s all he has.
Holly tried to throw the papers out once without knowing what they were. She hasn’t touched them since, though Lockwood catches her skimming through them sometimes.
George notices what Lockwood’s doing because he always does, but he lets it go without a word. It’s both entirely unlike George and the kindest thing he’s ever done.)
⚔
Christmas without Lucy around feels odd. Lockwood’s mostly gotten used to her absence by now—even managing not to say her name to his empty elbow on jobs—but something about the holidays makes it more obvious than ever how empty the house is. He very nearly buys her a new sketchbook and some nice pencils before realizing she won’t be there to give them to. George goes home because he hasn’t the last two years and his mother is insistent, and Lockwood tells Holly not to bother coming in over the holiday, so it’s just Lockwood alone in 35 Portland Row, the way it used to be before any of them and after his parents. After Jessica.
Lockwood spends Christmas Eve dealing with three Shades, a Lurker, and a Stone Knocker up a chimney, and even that doesn’t manage to distract him enough to feel any less lonely than he is.
⚔
In January, things get markedly worse. A few days after New Year’s, he goes on another case by himself—just a Phantasm in a book shop, nothing major. Nothing Lockwood can’t handle.
Except it turns out there’s two Phantasms, and when it comes down to getting ghost-touched or jumping out the plate glass front window, Lockwood chooses the window. He didn’t choose to crack his head on the concrete beneath it, or whatever he does that makes his neck feel like it’s on fire when he lands, but he does that too. He’s not entirely sure what happens then, except he wakes up in the hospital after, squeezing his eyes shut miserably against the psychic frisson and the abundance of death glows that shine brighter than the searing overhead lights, so whatever it was probably wasn’t a good thing.
There’s someone beside his bed, and later he’ll tell himself it was the pain medication and not his own foolishly addled hopes that had him groggily asking: “Luce—?”
It’s George.
He flinches at the name, but otherwise sits there at Lockwood’s bedside, unmoving as a mountain. His eyes are steely behind his glasses. Lockwood knows that look; it’s the same one he gave them after Sheen Road.
“She’s not coming back, Lockwood,” he says bitterly. It’s the cruelest possible thing he could have said in that moment, and Lockwood looks away.
George hisses out an angry sigh, pulling his glasses off and polishing them frustratedly on his rumpled jersey.
“It’s not your fault she left,” he bites, “so will you stop wallowing in your self-pity? Trying to get yourself killed to make yourself feel better about it isn’t going to get you anything but dead, you know.”
Lockwood says, “I’m not—”
“Oh? Oh?!” cries George, somewhere between incredulous and more furious than Lockwood’s ever heard him. “Then what’s this, then, exactly? Do tell me, Lockwood, I’m all ears.”
Lockwood’s fingers probe the bandage on his stinging neck, right where George’s sweeping gesture indicated.
“It’s just a cut,” he says dismissively. It’s the wrong thing to say.
“Just a cut?” George sputters, shoving up from the chair to his feet. “Just a bloody cut? Half an inch to the left and you’d have bled out before the paramedics could do a damn thing, Lockwood. Do you want it to be your funeral that Lucy comes back for?”
“I—”
George isn’t finished. Maybe he’s just getting started.
“You,” he says, jabbing a finger at Lockwood, practically quivering with rage, “nearly died tonight because you couldn’t get it through your stupid skull that people leave and it’s not your responsibility or place to make them stay!”
“George,” Lockwood begins helplessly, but it’s no use.
“No, I’m done. I’m done! Get your own cab back to Portland Row,” he says savagely, “or maybe get a hearse instead, if you’re so set on dying.”
And with that, he storms away, leaving Lockwood unable to do anything but stare after him in shock.
⚔
(George is back the next morning to bring Lockwood home, is the thing. That’s how it is with them, even if they’re both a little ashamed of it.
It does very little to change things in the end, though neither of them ever forgets it.)
⚔
In the end, it’s not Lockwood’s own doing but that of Penelope Fittes that provides him the opportunity he so desperately needs.
“I’ve been talking to Mr. Barnes at DEPRAC,” she tells him over the phone in late March, when the apple tree in the garden is just beginning to bud and the so-called Black Winter’s finally starting to break, “and I think I’ve got a case that’s just perfect for Lockwood and Company. Unfortunately, Mr. Barnes has informed me that your lovely Ms. Carlyle is no longer employed by your company.”
It’s been four months and two days since Lockwood last saw Lucy, not that anyone’s counting.
“That’s correct,” Lockwood says, practiced and casual and perfectly refined after four long, cold months of empty attics and kitchen chairs and an unused desk collecting dust in the basement. “She felt she was better suited to working in a freelance capacity and departed from the company some months ago.”
“Well,” purrs Penelope Fittes, coy as a peacock, “I’m afraid this case requires a Listener of Ms. Carlyle’s caliber, so I really must ask that you get her back if you want to take on this case, Anthony.”
“Ms. Fittes,” Lockwood says, a genuine smile creeping across his face for the first time since November, “you can count on me. I’ll talk to her straight away.”
Already he’s reaching for the worn-down card in his pocket; already he’s mapping out the route to her flat, the directions their conversation will take. If it were just Lockwood asking her to come back, he knows she’d say no. But one simply doesn’t turn down a job offer from Penelope Fittes.
“I’m so glad to hear that,” Ms. Fittes gushes.
Not, thinks a triumphant Lockwood, as glad as I am.
They go over a few more details and exchange the usual parting pleasantries before he finally manages to cut things off and hang up the phone without seeming too terribly rude.
And then Anthony Lockwood goes to see a girl about a ghost.